Clapper downplays North Korea tension

4/11/13 2:10 PM EDT

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Thursday that despite the fusillade of hostile threats in recent weeks from North Korean President Kim Jong-Un, tensions surrounding the reclusive government in Pyongyang are not as great as they were at two key points in the 1960s and 1970s.

Clapper said he was working in signals intelligence in 1968 when North Korea captured an American Navy research ship, the Pueblo, including 82 crewmembers, and he was working at U.S. Pacific Command in 1976 when two Army officers cutting down a tree in the demilitarized zone were killed with axes by North Korean forces.

"In those two cases, I thought the tenseness if you will, the genuine tenseness was actually greater than today," Clapper said at a House Intelligence Committee hearing. "What we have today is a lot of rhetoric, belligerent rhetoric, but I think some historical context might be helpful."

Clapper said, however, that U.S. intellgence has little insight into how the new, 30-year-old supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Un, will act.

"We don’t have good detail on the inner sanctum," the DNI said. "There's no telling how he's going to behave. He impresses me as impetuous not as inhibited as his father became about taking aggressive action."

"I think his primary objective is to consolidate, affirm his power," Clapper added at another point in the hearing. "First and foremost, it’s to show that he is firmly in control in North Korea…..I don’t think really he has much of an endgame other than to somehow elicit recognition from the world and specifically from the United States, of North Korea as a rival on the international scene, as a nuclear power and that entitles him to negotiation and accommodation, presumably for aid."

"We are watching this very closely to see whether this is consistent with past patterns of North Korean behavior," Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan said.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) suggested Clapper was understating the risk that the new North Korean leader might follow through on his threats.

"He's off pattern with his father," said Rogers. He said experts have told him: "If you’re ever going to be concerned, this is the time."

CORRECTION (Thursday, 3:26 P.M.): The initial version of this post inaccurately described the Pueblo as a submarine.